The present invention relates to a method of, and apparatus for, stacking paper currency, cards, printed sheets, etc., as they are supplied one by one. In the following disclosure and in the claims appended hereto the term "sheet" will be used to denote all such sheets of paper or other material that can be handled by the method and apparatus of the invention.
In banks and like monetary establishments, for example, the need exists for transporting a succession of bills, either after or while being counted, along a prescribed path and for stacking them in a delivery station, for easy extraction by bank personnel or customers. A variety of other industrial and commercial establishments have a need for similarly handling printed sheets, various types of cards, and other sheets.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,214,096, "Paper Currency Counter", issued to A. R. Buchholz et al. on Oct. 26, 1965, discloses a typical conventional example of sheet stacking means as incorporated in a paper currency counting machine. The bill stacking means according to Buchholz et al. include a plurality of endless belts to carry bills upwardly from an arcuate runway to a delivery compartment, the belts being maintained vertically at the level of the delivery compartment. The bills are assisted upwardly and moved longitudinally away from the belts by a plurality of spoked wheels mounted on a common drive shaft. The spokes of the wheels project through slots in the end of the bottom of the delivery compartment and engage the bottom edge of the bills to move them upwardly and away from the belts.
A problem with this known sheet stacking device is that the spoked wheels may fail to correctly engage the trailing edge of a bill being fed into the delivery compartment, leaving the trailing edge of the bill close to the belts in the delivery compartment. Should this happen, the leading edge of the next bill will strike against the trailing edge of the preceding bill in the delivery compartment. The result, of course, will be the jamming of the bills at the entrance to the delivery compartment.